Kurdish YPG/PKK terrorists have claimed to have targeted a Turkish military camp inside Turkey, killing 7. While this report has not yet been verified by the Turkish government, the way in which the claim was reported is significant in terms of Turkey-US relations.

The US has tried very hard to prove that the YPG, PKK and SDF are different groups. According to the overwrought US narrative the SDF is an umbrella group under the control of Washington made up of YPG units and a few Takfiri terrorists, including alleged “former” Daesh members. Perversely, this group, according to the US, has the goal of fighting what the US labels as Daesh, while not being an anti-Turkish terror group. Meanwhile, the US claims it does not directly arm the YPG, even though the YPG makes up the vast majority of the SDF. At the same time, the US rejects that either the SDF or YPG are affiliated with the Turkey based PKK which the US still lists as a terrorist organisation.

These distinctions by the US were always totally inaccurate. Under the eye of the US military, so-called SDF fighters celebrated the US destruction of the Syrian city of al-Raqqa by photographing themselves under a giant photo of the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, while flags of both the YPG and PKK were photographed among armed militants, amid the ruins of al-Raqqa city centre.

Today’s announcement of an attack on Turkish troops inside Turkey was made through spokesmen of the SDF, thus demonstrating that far from being an organisation which has the “limited mission” that US officials insist is has, the SDF and YPG are actually indistinguishable from the PKK, a terrorist group whose attacks in Turkey have claimed thousands of lives since the late 1970s.

The danger here is not just for Turkey but for any legitimate state, including Syria. A non-state, heavily armed militia with ambitions to annex the territory of legitimate states cannot be trusted by any state except one which itself is an aggressor. This is why the US maintains its alliance with Kurdish militants, in spite of assuring Turkey that this will not adversely affect Washington’s relationship with Ankara. The fact that Turkey-US relations are already strained over the Kurdish question is proof positive that no atmosphere of trust was re-built during US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s recent emergency visit to Turkey.

The danger for Syria is also great. Already SDF/YPG have been engaged in ethnically cleansing Arab villages and towns in preparation for a US backed annexation of territory which is integral to the Syrian Arab Republic.

The conflict in Syria has brought to light the reality that Kurdish terrorists threaten the sovereignty and territorial unity of both Turkey and the Syrian Arab Republic. It has been well documented that on Syrian territory, the illegal Kurdish regime of “Rojava”, Arabs are particularly discriminated against. Arabs are often forced to pay extremely high prices for basic goods which are sold cheaply to local Kurds. Likewise, the Kurdish regime has illegally changed the names of Arab towns, villages and cities in an attempt to acculturate Arab culture from locations in an internationally recognised Arab state. The most infamous instance of this acculturation is the unilateral refusal of Kurdish extremists to use the name Ayn al-Arab for the city they have tried to get the world to call “Kobani”.

Elsewhere, schools set up by Kurdish extremists deprive children of their legal right to be taught in Arabic, all the while anti-Syrian propaganda is shoved down the throats of the young. Most worryingly, in areas where Arabs and non-Kurdish minorities fled from Daesh, “Rojava” supporters have seized Arab private and public property and turned it into their own. Entire families have been prohibited from returning to their homes, not because of the largely vanquished Daesh, but because of “Rojava” and its heavily armed YPG terrorist militia. Likewise, just as Kibbutzim were built in strategically prominent and agriculturally rich locations in Palestine, so too was “Rojava” designed to encompass some of Syria’s most oil rich parts.

In this sense, Turkey and Syria both face the same threat of annexation, ethnic cleansing, cultural cleansing and the presence of heavily armed illegal Kurdish militias terrorising civilians.

Iraq and Iran face similar problems from ethno-nationalists Kurds which explains why Iraq, Turkey and Iran united to put an end to an attempted Kurdish insurgency against Iraq in September of 2017. In 2014, a group of heavily armed “Israel” backed Kurdish militants called Peshmerga, illegally occupied Iraq’s Kirkuk oil fields, thus depriving Iraq of a much needed source of revenue. By October of 2017, the Iraqi armed forces in alliance with Popular Mobilisation Units and the no-fly zone enforced jointly by Turkey and Iran, helped to end the insurgency. Some pointed to the fact that the Kurdish KPD in Iraq is politically disunited vis-a-vis the YPG in Syria, PKK in Turkey and PJAK in Iran. That not withstanding during the Autumn of 2017 Kurdish insurgency in Iraq when Kurdish forces throughout the region united in support of the uprising and so too did their common ally “Israel”.

The issue of Kurdish terrorism seems to be either dismissed outright or otherwise whitewashed by large sectors of both the mainstream and so-called alternative media. Far from simply succumbing to the idea that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, YPG terrorists in Syria stand accused of allowing Daesh terrorists safe passage through their territory, where they were then able to fire upon Syrian and allied Russian troops. Likewise, it has recently emerged that YPG/SDF militants have let Daesh fighters out of prison in exchange for their loyalty in the battle against Turkey. Similar stories have emerged in Iraq where it is widely believed that Kurdish Peshmerga militants bribed and cut deals with Daesh so that the Takfiri group would focus its barbaric violence upon Iraqi Arabs rather than Kurdish controlled areas.

Terror in the Middle East comes in many guises. Some of it is secular, some of it Takfiri/Wahhabi, some of it Zionist and some of it Kurdish. To whitewash or excuse any one of these terrorist traditions, has the effect of excusing them all.

At such a point, if the US felt so confident, The Pentagon could easily re-direct SDF forces to conquer territory held by the legitimate government of the Syrian Arab Republic, thus expanding the US zone of occupation in Syria beyond the oil rich regions it already illegally occupies.

Non-state groups cannot be trusted unless they have proved an integral relationship with a legitimate state. This is why any attempts to link the SDF with the Lebanese Resistance Hezbollah are not only absurd but insulting. Hezbollah is a legitimate political party that is part of the governing coalition in Lebanon. In forthcoming elections, whether or not the March 8 Coalition fights on a united ticket, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has stated that his party will continue its electoral pact with the popular Amal Movement whose leader Nabih Berri is the speaker of Lebanon’s Parliament. Furthermore, Hezbollah’s armed units act as a kind of national guard which works in tandem with the Lebanese Army in order to secure the frontiers of the country against Takfiri terrorism and “Israeli” aggression. Finally, Hezbollah has no international territorial ambitions and never has.

The SDF/YPG/PKK is nothing of the sort. Their loyalty is only to themselves, yet they will perversely temporarily ally with any foreign aggressor that is sympathetic to their desires of annexing the lands of Syria and Turkey, while their sister organisation PJAK in Iran, seeks to annex the territory of the Islamic Republic. As such Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is correct to say that the US will ultimately find its Kurdish proxies unreliable, in the sense that their goals will eventually diverge from that of the US.

Such a group simply cannot be trusted, which is why any broadly anti-Turkish alliance that some Syrians misguidedly believe in, would be nothing more than national suicide for the Syrian Arab Republic. Instead, all legitimate states should join forces against non-state aggressors which threaten the territorial integrity of regional states, in-line with the Astana group’s commitment to respect the territorial unity of Syria. The SDF/ YPG/PKK threatens the fundamental balance of power in the region, something which would harm all regional players except for the YPG’s historic and current ally, “Israel”.